Suneal Vemuri

ChE 352

Engineering Ethics Discussion

Engineers must often balance several conflicting obligations. When making a professional

decision, engineers should ensure that they are considering the decision’s ethical implications. Ethical

considerations may influence many of the actions that engineers decide to take, most notably those related

to accepting an assignment or job offer, going beyond legal obligations, and sacrificing short-term profits.

Accepting an assignment or job offer necessitates that the engineer be capable of completing the

assignment satisfactorily and acting without encountering conflicts of interest, as engineers lacking

competence or clear objectives could harm the welfare of both their clients and the public. In “Incident at

Morales,” Chuck decides to hire Fred largely because he had recently worked for Phaust’s main

competitor. While Fred was not required to sign a non-disclosure agreement, he may have still been privy

to information that was not publicly accessible; disclosing this information could still be illegal and would

violate the trust of Fred’s former employer. Given that Fred would have a conflict between performing his

job to the best of his ability and fulfilling his obligations to his past employer, he should not have

accepted the job offer at Phaust. Similarly, Chuck should have hired Fred based strictly on his

qualifications for the job, not his past employment at a competitor.

As the prior example demonstrates, acting ethically often involves making decisions based on

more than the minimum legal requirements. While the law serves as a baseline for ethical actions, there

are situations in which acting legally and acting ethically are not synonymous. For example, in “Testing

Water…& Ethics,” Jim realizes that two of the five wells his firm tested have substantially higher levels

of water pollution than the other three wells, but his firm, and by extension his client, who is interested in

selling the property containing the wells, is not legally required to disclose the pollution levels of the two

wells. While the pollution levels of the two wells still met water safety standards, Jim believed that not

disclosing the test results of the two wells could mislead prospective buyers of the property and

potentially harm public health. In this case, Jim’s firm encountered a conflict between their obligation to

the best interests of their client, who would likely experience a financial loss if the other test results were
 Suneal Vemuri
ChE 352

reported, and their obligation to the safety of the general public. Resolving this conflict required

application of the “reasonable sacrifice” standard, namely that while ethical obligations may involve

sacrificing self-interests, there are limits as to what a person or institution can be expected to sacrifice.

Applying this standard led Jim’s firm to conclude that by encouraging their client to report the test results

and drafting a new policy to prevent similar situations from arising in the future even though said policy

would harm future business, they had fulfilled their ethical obligations given that the pollution levels still

met safety standards.

Fulfilling ethical obligations often involves sacrificing short-term profits. The “reasonable

sacrifice,” standard can serve as a guiding principle to ensure that engineers and engineering institutions

are acting responsibly. The Space Shuttle Challenger incident involved the shuttle contracting firm

Morton Thiokol recommending a decision to launch the shuttle against the recommendations of several

engineers based on the firm’s financial incentives to launch early. In this situation, the potential danger of

launching an unstable shuttle outweighs the bonuses Morton Thiokol would receive for meeting launch

date targets; management should have postponed the launch until a warmer day (the safety problem

involved rings of the shuttle being prone to fracture at cold temperatures). This incident also illustrates the

importance of effective due diligence to ethical decision-making; while the engineers did recommend

postponing the launch, their recommendation was based on the test results of only the seven of twenty-

four launches that involved ring failure. Had their results communicated to management included the data

from the other seventeen launches, it would have been apparent that a launch under the observed

conditions would have a 99% chance of failure. As such, in this instance, the engineering team also failed

to uphold their ethical obligations by withholding information pertinent to the decision-making process.

At its core, professional ethics involves making decisions that may involve foregoing one’s self-

interests to benefit society. When experiencing an ethical dilemma, engineers should outline their

potential courses of action and evaluate each action’s consequences for both themselves and society.

Engineers and institutions can act ethically by sacrificing, to a reasonable extent, their personal interests

to fulfill their obligation to society.